Multicultural/Inclusive Learning & Teaching Philosophy
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slide set with preliminary notes as i build a public learning and teaching philosophy statement using non-traditional modes of delivery - as promised to students in a Teaching in Higher Ed course that I would make emergent document public. This is the penultimate draft - ready for final scripting.
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Multicultural/Inclusive Learning & Teaching Philosophy
- 1. island Multicultural Learning & Teaching Is Everybody’s Everyday Work. Period. Ilene D. Alexander
- 2. STUDENTS capable of learning capable of learning on their own capable of learning in other ways capable of resilient creativity LEARNERS
- 4. Adult Learning 1. THINK DIALECTICALLY recognize contextual, move between • objective/subjective • universal/specific 2. EMPLOY PRACTICAL LOGIC attend to internal features of given situation • reason in divergent, deep, critical ways
- 5. 3. KNOW HOW WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW • become conscious of learning • perspective taking • adjust ways of learning situationally • discern grounds for decision-making 4. ENGAGE IN CRITICAL REFLECTION assess the match between • earlier rules / practices / practical theories, and • emerging understandings in interpersonal, work, and political lives as well as learning life
- 6. Teachers and students must engage in multiple of ways of knowing, making sense of multiple sources, realities, solutions, conflicts, relationships, experiences and methods. “I need to learn and work in a variety of ways. Life is complex and so should learning be complex.” Marco “I need people to see me as an individual, yet entertain the possibility that I am also shaped by and bring strengths from my cultural ways of doing things.” Mikayla
- 7. What if we cast the classroom as a net of relationships with people who care about each other’s learning as well as their own?
- 8. Integration involves attempts to stimulate, test, and perhaps experience new understandings, and social, personal configurations. Ira de A. Reid: Journal of Negro Education, 1954
- 9. • bias and curiosity • hierarchy and yearning • certainty and whimsy • concepts and creativity • grammars and innovations • fear and possibility • facts and discovery
- 11. P Potential Coalitions Purposeful Communities C Participatory Collaborations Principled Considerations Pragmatic Connections Pertinent Contact Poignant Conjecture Practical Consensus Plucky Climates
- 12. The past is never dead. It’s not even past. William Faulkner
- 14. 1847 “blue book” report conclusions: the Welsh are ignorant, lazy, immoral among the causes of this: •Welsh language •nonconformity •teachers speak only English, provide only English language text-books
- 17. G U I L T is not a feeling. It is an intellectual mask to a feeling. Fear is a feeling. Fear is real.
- 18. Read Write Speak Draw: To Participate To Learn To Change
- 20. The work of a teacher involves bridging … recognition of meaning attribution & the power that emotions, values, and personal experience have in shaping interpretation of information.
Notas do Editor
- Multicultural Learning & Teaching Is Everybody’s Everyday Work. Period.I’ve been doing this work and using this declarative sentence as core message since doing a graduate seminar presentation at the University of Iowa sometime in the late 1980s. There, one of my colleagues asked “How is feminist pedagogy different from just good teaching?” In walking home, after stumbling for my answerings, I understood that “good teaching” for me had always been based on feminist pedagogy, my first grade teacher’s pedagogy of inclusive democratic classrooms built on inquiry, and my experience teaching in an Upward Bound program where English, Biology, Math and Computer teachers all made use of active learning practices for the wonderfully diverse first generation multicultural students in our classes. In all these settings, we knew that students brought ways of learning into the classroom, ways that didn’t always match the ways of the classrooms. But ways that, when we slowed to see the learning happening in all these other ways – ways that brought about learning differently. And ways that when shared among peers broadened how all the students learned. Even with “basic facts” or points of knowledge – sometimes drawing facts together in a map or telling a story of how facts came to make sense or applying a piece from life to understanding of the facts or speculating how and whether evidence of the facts could be found outside the classroom. Walking home in Iowa City that night with that question and those experiences, I heard this sentence in my ears. Since then, working in my own classrooms for 20+ years and working with hundreds of instructors and graduate students in teaching contexts, I’ve added the word Period. We can – and do – all do this work: Setting goals for student learning in our courses, developing the multiple discipline-relevant writing, speaking, drawing, testing and doing ways students can demonstrate learning – for themselves and for us, and then selecting learning activities and teaching practices that will require students to study materials, investigate questions, and construct meaning from multiple sources for specified purposes and audiences..What Is Multicultural Learning? http://www1.umn.edu/ohr/teachlearn/resources/multicultural/whatis/index.htmlMy colleague Carol Chomsky (University of Minnesota Law School) and I wrapped up five years of working with the Multicultural Teaching and Learning Fellowship Program – involving nearly 40 instructors – by writing the following statement for the University’s Driven to Discover campaign as a way to synthesize how we’d heard, experienced and witnessed the multicultural learning and teaching principles and practices across the disciplines represented by the fellows and our own work and philosophizing:Multicultural Learning is learning that integrates and explores the rich tapestry of perspectives reflected in our diverse world. It occurs when differences among learners are both valued and explored. Multicultural Learning recognizes and reaches across boundaries of ability, age, class, gender, nationality, race, religion, sexual orientation and other personal, social and cultural identities so that learners will more thoroughly understand the multifaceted dimensions of knowledge.Multicultural Learning re-examines and expands what is taught, and attends to who is in the classroom and is transparent about why this matters. It embraces the lived experience of the students, their families and their communities, connects with concepts of social justice and power, and teaches students how to investigate and integrate diverse ways of thinking and doing.Multicultural Learning must be cultivated. Learners need practice and guidance to become active listeners, readers and writers striving to understand what others are saying and meaning. Sustaining Multicultural Learning involves creating classroom climates in which students and teachers can acknowledge and address the discomfort of working across boundaries, learn how to respond to difference, and grow intellectually and personally as a consequence. To make multicultural learning both possible and effective, instructors must structure classroom interactions to be respectful and challenging, creative and meaningful, engaged and transformative. In such an environment, inaccuracies, mistakes, hasty generalizations and intolerance are addressed with honesty and care.Through regular and purposeful interactions that encourage students to reflect on and explore the implications of diversity and power, Multicultural Learning is education for life in our multicultural world.All photo images not cited otherwise are by http://www.flickr.com/IleneDawn. Creative Commons License: Attribution Share-Alike Non-Commercial.
- More Learning for More Learners.Or, as I say in the “kicker” line above the name of my personal (http://morelearning4morestudents.com) - If we don't understand learning, then how can we possibly teach? I speak about my learning happening in first grade, during my fifth year of college when I immersed myself in a political science major, in two 1970s active learning driven math courses, and in the yearly required social studies classes of junior and senior high school, where teachers built the curriculum around simulations and a backward design format – as in What is the ideal impact we want to have on students? What are the complex things that we want students to learn? What sort of learning skills, traits, characteristics are present across the group of students enrolled in courses I teach? What gaps in knowledge and skills exist between where my students are in their learning / as leaners and where they need to be as learners striving for that ideal impact? How will learning and teaching happen in my classroom so that students develop into these learners?Coffield, Frank. Just Suppose Learning & Teaching Became the First Priority. London, England: Learning and Skills Network, 2008: 7.Learning refers only to significant changes in capability, understanding, knowledge, practices, attitudes or values by individuals, groups, organisations or society. Two qualifications: It excludes the acquisition of factual information when it does not contribute to such changes. It also excludes immoral learning as when prisoners learn from other inmates in custody how to extend their repertoire of criminal activities.The blog post including a graphic distinguishing between Students and Learner that sparked this slide lives at http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/?p=2762, blog entry originally posted 8 October 2010.
- “Build a program [teaching and/or learning practice] that will deal with things as they are now and as they ought to be at the same time." – Myles HortonMyles Horton’s two-eyed approach to Highlander Folkschool workshopsinforms my understanding of learning and my approach to teaching. For example, students enrolled in a first year undergraduate course I teach that draws on content related to US civil rights history might view that history from perspectives including these: international student who are wary to speak out about civil rights or who have histories of doing such speaking at home but may or may not feel at ease making comments about US civil rights movements or histories; or US-schooled students whose cultural histories are linked to civil rights movements in multiple complex personal and cultural ways; students who have amassed sets of facts to tell particular stories about rights already achieved or to be guarded against. These same students may have preferences about how they will learn new content and about whether they will shape that information into new knowledge: some needing sequential development of ideas from data, others needing to hold in mind a framing theory / abstract concept as they map new information into an alignment that makes sense, and still others needing to speak or write more often than to listen in order to discover links among ideas and transitions from one idea to a next.Mariposa de dos ojos / Two-eyed 88: Callicore is a genus of nymphalid butterfly found in the Neotropical Ecozone. This genus, like some related ones, was formerly lumped together as the paraphyleticCatagramma assemblage.Species in this genus are commonly called eighty-eights or numberwings like the related genera Diaethria and Perisama, in reference to the characteristic patterns on the hindwing undersides of many. In Callicore, the pattern consists of bluish dots surrounded by black and looks more like "αB" or "8°", though some members of this genus have a completely different arrangement of dots. The forewing undersides vary little between species, being black with one or two broad orange-yellow bands in the basal part and one thin and one very faint yellowish band near the apex.Image: http://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/11111062
- Learning about learning is a lifelong act of “separating facts from cultural assumptions & beliefs about those facts.” (Jane Fried – see later slide)Students come to college with assumptions about what practices make for “good learning,” what are the characteristics of “good learning” and therefore who is a “good learner” and what that “good learner does in and out of class. They also come with expectations about roles of peers and for teachers in that “good learning” process. Two of the initial “thinking dialectically” experiences a new college should experience are these: Recognizing that learning processes of high school settings and learning practices of home contexts are only a small segment of the learning capacities, processes and practices necessary for the adult cognitive, affective and skills development expectations of higher level learning that will be expected as they enter public, college, young adult lives. Understanding that learning is been shaped by sets of cultural assumptions that shape beliefs about facts, and that thinking logically will require moving out of dualistic thinking.Brookfield, Stephen. “Adult Cognition as a Dimension of Lifelong Learning.” Working Papers of the Global Colloquium on Supporting Lifelong Learning, Milton Keynes, UK: Open University, 2000. Last accessed June 2012 via Papers link at http://www.open.ac.uk/lifelong-learning.Resources related to Discussion as a Way of Teachingthat Brookfield provides via his web site - http://stephenbrookfield.com – are especially valuable for studying then selecting discussion formats appropriate the learning outcomes and teaching goals of particular class sessions or out-of-class activities.** They’re not expecting what I’m expecting – link to Scotland Learning Culture statement. ** Need for a learning culture – engagement with dissonance (as teachers and learners)
- Learning is Lifewide. Lifewideness…recognises that most people no matter what their age or circumstances simultaneously inhabit a number of different spaces - like work or education, running a home, being a member of a family, being involved in a club or society, travelling and taking holidays and looking after themselves mentally, physically and spiritually. We live out our lives in these different spaces, we make decisions about what we choose to be involved in, we meet and interact with different people, have different sorts of relationships, adopt different roles and identities, and think, behave and communicate in different ways. We engage in different sorts of experiences, encounter different sorts of challenges and problems, seize or miss opportunities, and aspire to achieve our ambitions.Jackson, Norman. Lifewide Education Wiki. http://lifewideeducation.pbworks.com/w/page/34134626/FrontPage** come back to this to provide link to constructivism build in the biology class example with misconceptions/knowledge gaps / hypothesis & null **
- "The real challenge in college teaching is not covering the material for the students but uncovering the material with the students." Karl Smithhttp://www.ce.umn.edu/~smith/ Click “Books, Articles, Presentations and Workshops” then use diversity to search for resources.** Listening to student voices – and to voices of those who students will encounter as they work and live in communities. What are the modes of learning students note wanting? What are the ranges of skills future employers and community leaders speak of as necessary for the understandings of world and work that are emerging? **
- “A classroom characterized as persons connected in a net of relationships with people who care about each other's learning as well as their own is very different from classroom that is comprised of teacher and students.” – Carolyn ShrewsburyShrewsbury, Carolyn M. "What is Feminist Pedagogy?" Women's Studies Quarterly 15.3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 1987): 6-14.The daily process of communication strives to “help student and teacher learn to think in new ways, especially ways that enhance the integrity… of the person and the person's connections with others. Critical thinking then is not an abstracted analysis but a reflective process firmly grounded in the experiences of everyday…” (6)** add Patti Lather on authority **** these as basis for a learning culture **
- We all carry intangibles, implicit expectations – into classrooms; therefore, I expect to create with students a classroom climate that expects complex learning and complex learners.The intangibles have tangible weight, are borne with the weight of multiple codes of conduct, and exist as tensions – paradoxes and contraries – by beings with complex identities negotiate a public space that need not be framed by prevailing communication conventions that privilege “conflict free” and “safe” communication spaces. Free of conflict and safe – for whom? at what cognitive and psychological costs?O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried.New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1990.“They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank. Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct….They carried like freight trains; they carried it on their backs and shoulders - and for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.” “Grief, terror, love, longing - these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture.”
- Therefore,I teach as a Cousin* in the classroom……mindful of the fulcrums we navigate as teachers: attention to Knowledge (Profession) and Learners (Students); guiding my interactions with learners as a Steward (Gatekeeper to ideas, methods and conflicts within profession, field, aligned cultures across time) and an Ally (to emergences – of new configurations, concepts, ideas, practices, paradigms, practitioners, ways of investigating and sharing ideas); engaging the practices of learning and teaching as Facilitator (Elbow’s word for how he imagines teachers interacting with learners in constructing knowledge) and Cousin (the analogy I add to the mix – as number 43 of 48 cousins I’ve benefitted from others disclosing how they learn, from asking about learning, from sharing my own confusions from the midst of learning, and from being expected to just get on with studying to know what others have learned as well as being guided in setting out to discover what I will learn).Elbow, Peter. “Embracing the Contraries in the Teaching Process.” College English 45. 4 (April 1983): 327-339. (Summary below an adaptation of original by Jane O’Brien & Christina I. Petersen) In this article Peter Elbow outlines his belief that good teaching is challenging because it requires an obligation to students and an obligation to meaning making (or knowledge/society). The former he describes by viewing teachers as allies to students. Teachers show their commitment to students by assuming all are learners capable of learning and help bring out their best when it comes to tests and grades. The latter, the commitment is to meaning making and knowledge/society. Elbow affirms a contradictory stance as desirable: The teacher acts as a Gatekeeper sets high standards for the course, which are communicated to students in the beginning and throughout the course. For example, when new assignments are brought into class he advises that assessment, grading, and other Gatekeeper functions should be presented in a serious manner with the Gatekeeper also clearly noting how s/he intends to fulfill their commitment to knowledge/society through assessments, exams and grades. The companion role of Embracing Contraries is the Ally role. For example, with the new assignments an Ally will make note of the way the course is layered/set up/scaffolded to develop learning in ways to help students meet those high standards. The Ally will also point to resources available beyond classroom activities: peer revision expectations, examples of previous excellent writing or practice tests, early feedback opportunities, and routes to accessing print, electronic/digital and human resources.While Elbow concedes that there is no one right way to teach, he does conclude that to teach well, instructors must find a way to be loyal to both students and to knowledge and society.Image:http://www.cabot.net/buttons/without.php*Cousin -related, kindred, analogous
- We need to be taught to study rather than to believe, to inquire rather than affirm. Septima Clark (1975 Christmas Card)Believe the past Study the past to learn lost questions and strands of dissentAffirm the past Inquire about pasts and futures to learn how wicked problems worked/work out/work in the present** transition slide - Steele on actor and perceiver, along with Brookfield’s 4 Lenses: autobiography, student voices, peer interactions/observations, literature of the fieldSteele, Claude M. Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us. New York: Norton, 2010. On the Observer’s Perspective and Actor’s Perspective:“Some years ago, two social psychologists, Edward Jones and Richard Nisbett, argued that when it comes to explaining people’s behavior – something like achievement problems, for example – there is a big difference between the “observer’s perspective” – the perspective of a person observing the behavior – and the “actor’s perspective” – the perspective of a person doing the behavior. As observers, Jones and Nisbett said, we’re looking at the actor, the person doing the behavior we are trying to explain. Thus the actor dominates our literal and mental visual field, which make the circumstances to which he is responding less visible to us. In the resulting picture in our minds, the actor sticks out like a sore thumb and the circumstances to which he is responding are obscured from view. Jones and Nisbett held that this picture causes a bias when we try to explain the actor’s behavior. We emphasize the things we can see. We emphasize things about the actor – characteristics, trains, and so on – that seem like plausible explanations for her behavior. And we deemphasize, as causes of her behavior, the things we can’t see very well, namely, the circumstances to which she is adapting.”
- My job is to try to provide a climate which nurtures islands of decency, where people can learn in such a way that they continue to grow. Myles HortonHorton, Myles(with Herbert and Judith Kohl). The Long Haul: An Autobiography. New York: Anchor Books, 1991.Chávez, Alicia Fedelina. “Islands of Empowerment: Facilitating Multicultural Learning Communities in College.” International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 19.3 (2007): 274-88. Last assessed June 2012: http://www.isetl.org/ijtlhe/pdf/IJTLHE261.pdf.Multiculturally congruent classroom learning environments have remained elusive in United States higher education as colleges strive to recruit, retain, and educate an increasingly diverse population. Frustrations run high amongst domestic and international students of color who find collegiate classrooms in the United States difficult to negotiate and often pedagogically incongruent with their own ways of learning and interacting. This article offers findings from a qualitative research study of four professors identified as multiculturally empowering by minority and international students in their college. Results are derived from three qualitative methods of data collection including faculty interviews, student interviews, and classroom observations. Findings suggest six elemental dynamics necessary for college professors to develop and facilitate empowering multicultural learning communities:(a) climate of safety, (b) spirit of risk taking, (c) congruence,(d) reciprocal relationships and roles,(e) multiplicity, and (f) reciprocity.Implications for teaching in cross-cultural collegiate environments are included.
- The language of Cambria lives out to this day…The harp of my country survives.*My grandmother taught me – as her Welsh grandmother had taught her – to see the vilification Welsh people, culture, and language as central to acts of colonization entered into by English monarchies and tacitly as wells as explicitly acted upon by those who came to resettle, civilize and profit from Welsh life and lands. In this, she aimed taught two things about facing injustice: To ask and answer the questions “What are YOU going to do about it?” To be present as an ally to hear others ask and answer the question “What are WE going to do about it?”Awareness and AngerRecognition and ResilienceWitness and Ways ForwardBehind the questions:That I would see the multiple ways the Welsh, Irish and English who were “her people” had acted out responses to her most frequently asked question: “What are you going to do about it?” [Only years later did I hear that Gram shifted between two tones: one marked by resignation and acceptance and one by pragmatism and resilience. That I – and we – might understand comprehend injustice, noting the parallels in power closer to my own daily life, coming to witness actions of US governments, corporations and citizens impacting Midwest Dakota – people being stripped of culture, of home, of histories, of daily life and language in the Westward settlement of primarily white immigrants and emigrants that sanctioned catastrophic practices of cultural genocide and governmental oppression, enactment by policy of preferential citizenship and interpersonal prejudices. From Welsh Nationalism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_nationalism) and Treachery of the Blue Books (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treachery_of_the_Blue_Books):The "Reports of the commissioners of enquiry into the state of education in Wales" in 1847 found the education system in Wales to be in a” dreadful state.” The commissioners concluded that the Welsh as a people were dirty, ignorant, lazy, drunk, superstitious, lying, and cheating because they were Nonconformists and spoke Welsh. Very quickly, because of its blue covers, the report was labeled Brad y LlyfrauGleision, or in English, "The Treachery of the Blue Books.” An important contextual note: just as the Commissioners were exclusively English-speaking and the education system was then largely conducted in Welsh, no one in Parliament questioned this report for being commissioned by and carried out entirely by representatives of English elite ministries offices.*From Land of My Fathers - Hen WladFyNhadau: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hen_Wlad_Fy_NhadauOne of four offered translations for the last verse of the Welsh National Anthem:My country tho' crushed by a hostile array,The language of Cambria lives out to this day;The muse has eluded the traitors' foul knives,The harp of my country survives.
- “I was taken to be a Negro.”My father on identity, language, perception and acting as an ally in accidental before intentional ways.** develop the ally idea **
- **The Minnesota history project my 4th grade teacher wanted me to produce – a research paper on the Minnesota State Flag. I still have it. Only remember the history when I open the folder with this map of Minnesota on the cover. Notice that the only places named are Mankato, the two bending to meet there, and the Mississippi into which this confluence flows. The project I wanted to write:paper on the marker then at Mankato’s Main Street Bridge intersection. A photo of that marker as well as reporting on the 1862 Dakota-US War, the executions by hanging on 26 December 1862, and the marker’s disappearance in the 1970s: http://www.nickcolemanmn.com/?cat=52.Mankato demographics: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mankato,_MinnesotaThe racial makeup of the city was92.55% White1.90% African American 0.34% Native American2.81% Asian0.10% Pacific Islander0.94% from other races1.36% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 2.22% of the population.
- Emotions emerge to mark places where learning is beginning to deepen, uncomfortably.** Fried: third is perhaps the most difficult to learn, that of differentiating between personal discomfort and intellectual disagreement.”On Guilt – from Moraga, Cherrie, and Gloria Anzaldua, editors. This Bridge Called My Back. New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983: 64.“But you work with what you have, whatever your skin color. Racism is societal and institutional. It implies the power to implement racist ideology. Women of color do not have such power, but white women are born with it and the greater their economic privilege, the greater their power. This is how white middle-class women emerge among feminist ranks as the greatest propagators of racism in the movement. Rather than using their privilege they have to crumble the institutions that house the sources of their oppression – sexism, along with racism – they oftentimes deny their privilege in the form of 'downward mobility,' or keep it intact in the form of guilt. Fear is a feeling – fear of losing one's power, fear of being accused, fear of a loss of status, control, knowledge. Guilt is NOT a feeling. It is an intellectual mask to a feeling. Fear is real. Possibly this is the emotional, non-theoretical place from which serious anti-racist work among white feminists can begin.”** provide link to Perry / Belenky et al / Baxter-Magolda - dissonance
- “Now, if you’re free, you aren’t afraid to learn from everybody and anybody.”– Myles HortonSocial ReadingSocial WritingSocial SpeakingSocial Audiences
- What are YOU going to do about that?** on Gram’s frequentquestion to me – and on not noticing the tone shifts – one a pressing question and one a depressing resignation. **Pat Parker, black lesbian activist poet & health care advocateIf I could take all my parts with me when I go somewhere, and not have to say to one of them, "No, you stay home tonight, you won't be welcome.”The day all the different parts of me can come along, we would have what I would call a revolution.Might have opted for lines from “for the white person who wants to know how to be my friend” In Movement in Black. Expanded Edition. San Francisco: Firebrand Books, 1999: 99. Generally: http://www.queertheory.com/histories/p/parker_pat.htmThe first thing you do is to forget that i’m Black. Second, you must never forget that i’m Black. Could also have incorporated lines from her “For The Straight Folks Who Don't Mind Gays But Wish They Weren't So Blatant” – also in Movement in Black (pg 142):“Fact is, blatant heterosexuals are all over the place. Supermarkets, movies, on your job, in church, in books, on television every day and night, every place -even in gay bars- and they want gay men and woman to go and hide in the closet.“So to you straight folks I say, "Sure, I'll go if you go too. But, I'm polite so, after you.”
- We believe that as teachers must, figuratively and sometimes literally, sit beside our students to collaboratively understand what has been learned, how that has come to be, and how to create conditions that will further inspire intellectual growth. On the word assessmenthaving its roots in Latin Assidere: to sit beside: Raymond Wlodkowski and Margery Ginsberg. Diversity and Motivation. “Engendering Competence.” Jossey-Bass, 1995: 231.Fried. Jane. “Bridging Emotion and Intellect.” College Teaching. 41.4 (Fall 1993 ): 123-8.The work of a teacher involves (1) development of critical thinking skills, so that students understand how to organize data, analyze, synthesize, evaluate, and draw conclusions; (2) recognition of meaning attribution and the power that emotions, values, and personal experience have in shaping one's interpretation of information. The professor, therefore, becomes responsible for teaching students 3 sets of skills: first is separating facts from cultural assumptions & beliefs about those facts second is teaching students how to shift perspective third is perhaps the most difficult to learn, that of differentiating between personal discomfort and intellectual disagreement.Tatum, Beverly Daniel. "Teaching White Students about Racism: The Search for White Allies and the Restoration of Hope." Teachers College Record 95.4 (Summer 1994): 462-475.